notes from the winemaker

“I have never seen anything like this…”

I heard this sentiment expressed by more growers and winemakers during the 2011 harvest than ever before in my 25 years of doing this. I said it myself any number of times. It’s not that any one thing about this vintage stood out on its own as unusual or unprecedented. What was unusual was the additive effects of the sheer number of unusual factors.

I brought experience to bear on the problems we faced. Also, I was very lucky. Our wines have turned out well. So as we sail into 2012 here is my look back at the wild, wonderful 2011 (n.b.—long post ahead).

For many the defining event of the vintage was the rain October 3rd-5th. For 72 hours before and 72 hours after that storm, there was not an idle picking crew anywhere in the North Coast. The gente were working around the clock, sleeping in their cars in two-hour shifts. A cottage industry sprung up around supplying them food and drink on-site. At one point I saw as many trucks on the road towing porta-potties as there were trucks hauling grapes. You could hear the tractors and see the light bars moving through the fields all night long. I had never seen anything like it.

I heard chilling anecdotes; one was of a large Chardonnay vineyard in the Petaluma Gap that rotted overnight. They could not deliver on any of their negotiated contracts, and ended up selling the entire crop for pennies on the dollar to Central Valley producers with flash détente machines. Ouch.

Joel Peterson of Ravenswood was quoted in Drinks Business:

“It was the most fungus-filled, botrytis-filled vintage I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been working a long time. Napa Cabernet never got ripe; it was a very bad year for Napa and Mendocino. We had to sort our Cabernet and Merlot in the field and crush straight away – I’ve never had to do that before. We lost 40% of our crop to the rains. There will be some awful Cabernets – green, oxidized and botrytized. The quality of 2011 will depend on who sorted well.”

Talking with Steven Tanzer, Joel had this to say about sorting:

“I learned that the cleanest fruit doesn’t always make the best wine… [W]e performed different levels of sorting on the same fruit and fermented each batch separately… Up to 10% damaged fruit did not seem to affect the taste of the resulting wine adversely…”

Alder Yarrow quoted Cameron Hughes winemaker Sam Spencer in
Vinography:

“There’s a lot of really fucked up wine out there.”

<Is it wrong that this quote gives me a little shot of schadenfreude? I suppose I’m being a bit petty, but it does.>

Then I found this evocative encapsulation of the vintage, as experienced by winemaker Abe Schoener, writing in The Wine Cellar Insider:

“The ancient Greeks called this kind of experience deinos—terrible, but amazing too… The report this year: Harvest is wonderful, a joyous culmination, as it always is. But it also reveals itself a much more serious event, holding the possibility of terror, catastrophe.

Sounds pretty crappy all around, right? Well—it was, and it wasn’t. The 2011 vintage was difficult, yes, and there will be less volume than average produced by wineries in the ultra-premium segment of the market. But I believe many of those wines will surprise and delight.

Quoting my friend Tyler Thomas, writing a nuanced piece in his blog over at Donelan Wines:

This vintage also reveals wine’s resiliency. We like neat categories – to say that a vintage is either great or not great; but this is silly. Despite the climatic factors that led to a difficult year and some poor quality, there will be plenty of great 2011 wines. The pleasure of wine is not necessarily robbed by rain or rot or similar challenges. While many grapes were lost, many perfectly suitable grapes remained, dying to be made into perfectly suitable wine.

As Tyler has, I’d like to do what I can to get ahead on the public relations front before the gatekeepers write off the vintage or damn it with faint praise. Herewith, my own bullet points on the most wonderful, terrifying vintage in my experience:

• The year started out benignly: post-harvest 2010 we had a wetter-than-average December, dry January, normal February. But the we had a very cold, wet March with frosts in April and May. The cool weather–and our late pruning–delayed budbreak at our Estate vineyard, but not enough to avoid minor crop-limiting frost damage to early shoot growth.
  
  
• Then came a surprisingly cold, wet June; rains at the end of the month smashed records dating back over 60 years. During flowering we had rains and temperature swings that ended up drastically reducing the amount of fruit that ultimately set in our vineyard. This was a critical period for growers throughout the North Coast. The rain hit those vineyards that set early just at cluster closure; this proved to be disastrous later in the year as Botrytis rot got started inside the clusters. Our fruit was weeks behind and berries had just started to swell; there was little chance for rot to get started inside the clusters.
  
  
• On a positive note, at 41.4″ total rainfall 2011 was the third wettest growing season I have tracked since 1998 (56.2″; 2006, at 48.5″, was also wetter than 2011). Due to the timing of the rains and the cool weather we didn’t observe any water stress in the vineyard until the middle of August, when we made our first irrigation of the year. This is unusual—in a normal season we might start in early June. I speculate that this encouraged very deep rooting on our young vines planted in 2009 (a good thing).
  
  
• For whatever reason(s), this year physiological ripeness in the fruit preceded sugar accumulation. Usually, we have to use canopy management and irrigation to slow the rate of sugar increase in order to allow the skin, pulp, and especially the seeds to fully mature. This year it was not an issue—acids, seed and skins ripened first; all I had to wait for was sugar and flavor.
  
  
• What was an issue was a very unusual spread in cluster maturity. On the same shoot we observed first crop where one cluster would be through veraison while the second cluster was not yet through berry sizing. I saw some of this in our Pinot in 2005, but in 2011 it was present in every variety at our vineyard. We had to drop nearly half the already sparse crop to even up the ripeness as much as possible. Nevertheless, there was more spread in ripeness between clusters in 2011 than we expect to encounter in a “normal” vintage.
  
  
• I also observed an unusual reversal in the order of senescence between the canopy and the crop. In every other vintage I have experienced, the basal leaves in the canopy turn yellow and may start to drop before the clusters get ripe (as in 2008, for example). Not so in 2011. This vintage, the berries started to fall off the clusters while the leaves were still green to the bottom of the canopy. I have no idea what to make of this, either in terms of a physiological explanation or as a predictor of quality.
  
  
• Even if we could have assembled a picking crew before the rain, it would not have mattered. The Pinot just was not ready. After the rain we sent the guys through looking for rot and dropping rotted clusters. The worst damage was in the heritage Haynes Vineyard selection block, where we dropped about one cluster every other vine.
  
  
• After the rain we had a string of warmer days, which pushed the Pinot along. We started harvest on October 19^th, over 16 days later than our late start in 2010. The Pinot harvest confirmed my predictions on yield—we barely averaged one ton/acre across all the Pinot, yields less than 50% of average. Justin, who has spent the last three vintages working for high-end producers in Napa, said he had never worked with such clean fruit. We do all our sorting in the vineyard, so we don’t need to at the winery.
  
  
• Tannat and Syrah came in as beautiful as I have ever seen. That left our late-ripening varieties to bring in: Grenache, Mourvedre and Counoise. Another shot of rain was forecast for November 4^th which I was sure the vines could have weathered. What concerned me was the hard frosts forecast for the nights after this rain. The flavors were there in these varieties, even if the sugars were low. I decided not to risk frost damage and pulled the trigger on picking the last of the crop November 3^rd. This made 2011 the most compressed harvest I have ever done, at just 15 days for start to finish. And the yields in all the varieties were down just as much from averages at the Pinot was.
  
  
• The decision to pick turned out to be the right call—the vineyard was subjected to over 4 hours of temperatures in the mid-20s F on the nights of the 5^th and 6^th. Driving north through Kenwood on the 7^th the vineyards looked like a war zone from frost damage. When I arrived at our Estate I discovered over two-thirds of the vines scorched, as though nature had licked the canopy with a flame thrower from above.
  
  
• This was not a vintage to take chances in the winery. No stems or whole-cluster. More SO₂ than I would ordinarily use. Fewer punchdowns. Following my normal practice, all ferments started on indigenous microflora, but everything was also inoculated with cultured yeast between 12° Brix and 8° Brix to assure a rapid and clean end to fermentation. Ferments proceeded rapidly—most finished in less than a week. I took advantage of the residual heat in the musts and inoculated for malolactic before pressing. All the wines were through malo within days, allowing me to add a second dose of SO₂ earlier than usual, thereby protecting the wine from potential color degradation.
  
  
• The wines all ended up with less alcohol than in previous vintages. Not only was there less sugar in the grapes when they were otherwise ripe this year, but the so-called “conversion ratio” for fermentation—the observed percentage of final alcohol achieved from the measured starting Brix—was also lower. On average I see conversion ratios of 0.59±0.01 for most of my ferments, but this year none topped 0.55; a number of my colleagues mentioned seeing the same thing. No explanation.
  
  
• Lower alcohols aside, post-malo acid levels were as low, and the pH levels as high, as though the grapes had been harvested at 25° Brix rather than at 22°. This is supporting evidence that the grapes were at full physiological ripeness at the lower sugar levels.
  
  
• Expecting that the wines will be more elegant than powerful, I have backed off on the fraction of new wood the Pinot is being aged in, from 50% in an average vintage down to 25% for 2011. As has become standard practice for me, the wines from the Rhône varieties will see no new wood during aging.
  
  

So there we have it. A difficult, late, compressed, low yield, low alcohol vintage—one that has given us elegant wines. And I have to say that, so far, these wines show higher quality and more character than I could have hoped. That’s no myth. That’s just fact.